‘Lord Geraldine has many superiorities over me. He has the patience to play at Platonic cicisbeism as children play for counters,’ said Othmar, with a brusque contempt.
‘That is neither a well-bred speech nor a true one,’ said Nadine Napraxine very calmly, as she set down her cup.
‘Its breeding I cannot defend, its truth I do,’ he answered coldly. ‘There are men who can spend their lives carrying a woman’s fan, and ask for nothing more at her hands; they have merits, no doubt, but they are not those which I appreciate.’
‘Poor Ralph! if he heard you!’ she said, with a little yawn which she could not control, though she tried to stifle it with a cigarette. ‘He thinks himself far more manly than you because he shoots fur and feather, and you do not kill anything—except a man now and then!’
‘I may yet add to the list of the latter,’ said Othmar.
‘The Mongolians have made you very savage,’ she said, as she lighted the cigarette. ‘And you used to be so gentle.’
‘I used to be many things that I have ceased to be since the twentieth of April a year and eight months ago,’ said Othmar.
She had forgotten the date which he remembered so accurately, the date of the day on which they had parted in her own room in Paris, with the smell of the lilac of the avenue coming in through the open windows, and the sunset rays, as they came through the rose-coloured blinds, touching her fair face, and the curl of her long dark lashes, and the beautiful mouth with the little cruel languid smile on it as she had said, ‘I will have no melodramatic passions to disturb me.’
She looked at him now with the demure un-selfconsciousness of a child.
‘Ah! I never could remember dates,’ she murmured. ‘I was the despair of all my governesses, I had such a bad memory.’